No modern American writer has had so lively a posthumous life as Flannery O’Connor.
When she she died, of lupus, in August 1964, age thirty-nine, she was the author of two novels—Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960)—and a collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). Earlier in 1964 she had signed a contract for a second collection, to be calledEverything That Rises Must Converge, and she had revised her will to provide for the eventual publication of the several hundred letters she had written and kept in carbon.
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Remarkably, her posthumous works—all adroitly edited and published by FSG—joined her works proper in volume and stature.Everything That Rises Must Converge, published in 1965, drew the unstinting appreciation O’Connor had craved but never received (a fact now forgotten) in her lifetime, and her friend Robert Fitzgerald’s introduction established her crucial formative relationships with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and other literary figures. Mystery & Manners, a volume of O’Connor’s “occasional prose” selected by Robert and Sally Fitzgerald and published in 1969, shaped the interpretation of her fiction from the hereafter, as it were—and introduced her, unforgettably, as a lover of peacocks and broad Southern humor. The Complete Stories, published in 1974, won a National Book Award and consolidated her achievement in the short form, and her longtime editor Robert Giroux’s introduction established her as a writer among other writers from Robert Penn Warren to Thomas Merton and Elizabeth Bishop. Three by Flannery O’Connor assembled the two novels andA Good Man Is Hard to Find for students, who read it and essayed on it by the tens of thousands, and entered crucial details of O’Connor’s life into the record through Sally Fitzgerald’s introduction.
The Habit of Being, a volume of letters selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald, won a special citation from the National Book Awards, and the book itself won a place on the short shelf of books of letters by modern writers to be read not as ancillary works but as literature in their own right; and the range and verbal dash of the correspondence dispelled the deeply rooted notion of O’Connor as a morose rural recluse. The Library of America edition of O’Connor’s work (1988) was that distinguished series’ first volume devoted to a postwar American writer, and Fitzgerald’s detailed chronology was a setting-off point for a number of biographical works, including my own, The Life You Save May Be Your Own—a group portrait of O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day published by FSG in 2003.
Published a year ago, the Prayer Journal—diary entries, prayers, or intimate letters to God that O’Connor wrote while a graduate student at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1946 and 1947—has entered the canon already.
In the years I spent writing The Life You Save May Be Your Own, the large collection of O’Connor materials recently placed with Emory University’s Special Collections was not accessible to writers and scholars. FSG’s publication of the Prayer Journal, then, offered an opportunity for me to add a crucial episode to my published account of O’Connor’s life—to insert a missing piece of the puzzle. That is what I’ve sought to do in the essay below.
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